The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

14th February, 2012 – Beaverton, OR – The Khronos™ Group today announced the release of OpenMAX™ IL 1.2 as a provisional specification. OpenMAX IL is a royalty-free, cross-platform C-language API for integration of multimedia components into media frameworks to simplify deployment of audio/video encoders/decoders, camera control, and audio, video and image processing algorithms across diverse platforms. OpenMAX IL 1.2 is a backward compatible upgrade that includes dynamic buffer allocation, improved media graph management, in-band signaling, enhanced audio video synchronization, a wider range of standard components and enhanced camera control capabilities together with many other improvements and clarifications to increase interoperability between media processing components. The specification has been released in provisional form to enable developers and implementers to provide feedback before specification finalization. The OpenMAX IL 1.2 provisional specification is available for immediate download.

OpenMAX IL is the integration layer of the OpenMAX family of APIs for multimedia acceleration and application development. Khronos also provides the OpenMAX AL (Application Layer) API for object oriented access to rich media acceleration, and OpenSL ES for advanced audio capabilities. OpenMAX IL is well suited to provide the base graph building infrastructure for such higher-level APIs. A discussion forum for feedback on the OpenMAX IL specification is available online.

“The mobile market is constantly evolving and demanding ever increasing multimedia functionality and performance. The OpenMAX IL specification enables chipset vendors to take best advantage of their acceleration capabilities and is a key element of the overall Khronos solution for accelerated multimedia. This release is an important milestone, proposing an up-to date version of the specification to implementers, and is a strong base of work for future innovation,” said Thierry Vuillaume, standardization manager at ST-Ericsson CTO Office, and chair of the OpenMAX IL Working Group.

Khronos also today released a VP8 and WebP Codec Component extension for OpenMAX IL 1.1.2, enabling integration of encoders and decoders for VP8, the video codec used in WebM media format, and WebP image encoders and decoders, in existing OpenMAX IL implementations. The VP8 and WebP Codec Component extension is available online.

Also today, Khronos released the Content Pipe 1.0 specification. Previously part of OpenMAX 1.1.2, it is now presented as a standalone specification for use in conjunction with OpenMAX IL, OpenSL ES or OpenMAX AL. The Content Pipe specification abstracts data access to streamline media data transfer, enabling a multimedia system to be built for an arbitrary delivery method without having to deal with the specifics of the delivery details. In addition, the Content Pipe specification allows an application to preprocess the data before sending it to the underlying multimedia framework, such as in the case of proprietary delivery methods of premium media content. The Content Pipe specification is available for download online.

OpenMAX IL 1.2 Capabilities

The new OpenMAX IL 1.2 provisional specification includes the following improvements:

The introduction of dynamic buffer allocation, in addition to statically pre-announced buffers, to enable the usage of OpenMAX IL in a wider range of frameworks;

Improvements in robustness of the graph management, such as the elimination of possible race conditions, and the ability to cancel pending commands to avoid deadlocks;

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is an industry consortium creating open standards to enable the authoring and acceleration of graphics, parallel computing, dynamic media and sensor processing on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos standards include OpenGL®, OpenGL® ES, WebGL™, WebCL, OpenCL™, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenKODE™, StreamInput and COLLADA™. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.